Today’s Topical Post

It's Juno weekend in the temporary home of the Junos. You'd be amazed at the sort of thing that happens surrounding these sorts of events and the people that you meet. In fact, the other day I ran into a guy I went to high school with. He's a big man with one of the smaller labels. We got to talking and it turned out that he needed a guy to become the travelling manager for a couple of his acts while they were on tour and he offered me the job. I told him that I didn't drive a car let alone a bus but he assured me that they needed someone who could work with the talent and keep things running smoothly. I agreed to take the job – well with the money and fringe benefits they were offering how could I not accept. This won't interfere with my blogging as I was promised a company laptop.

I'll be working with two acts. The first is called Lirpa Sloof. They're a Scandinavian fusion band (in this case that means that there are members from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland) made up of three women, two men and a castrated cat, that performs the complete works of Abba in the original Swedish but with a reggae beat. They also do a lot of things backwards. For example the drummer sits facing away from the audience. This is because he can't perform if he can actually see an audience in front of him. Of course if you saw him you'd realize that he was doing the audience a real favour. They're still working on a way to play their guitars backwards which is a lot harder than you might think. One of the band's big numbers is doing Waterloo in Swedish backwards – they call it Oolretaw and oddly enough it's not bad.

The other act I'll be working with is a young chanteuse from Quebec named Avril Poisson. She may be the real problem. Not only does she have the nasty habit of wanting to get naked at the most inconvenient times – usually when she's on stage, although we're trying to restrict her nudist tendencies to the bus – but there's the whole language issue. There are some people who want Avril to anglicize her given name while the tour is in small town Alberta – in other words to make her first name April. Fools in Alberta might try to disrupt her shows if they know she's from Quebec, or at least that's what the corporate types in Toronto think. Personally I think the fact that she only sings in French – and the Joual slang dialect at that – might be a bit of a tip off. Of course none of that will matter if she starts taking off her clothes on stage. And besides, she's already working under a stage name; her real name is Poisson d'Avril (her parents indulged in way too many recreational pharmaceuticals before she was born).

Wish me luck – I'll probably need it!